Latest Colum McCann Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

  Colum McCann

  Jobs, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

  Colum McCann

  People, Stories, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Personally, I like the social novel. I like writing that gets in and under the hood and looks about - at what's going on. But I don't say to any writer that that's absolutely what they should do.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Looks, Social

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Stories, Want

  Source: www.pbs.org

• A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.

  Colum McCann

  Clever, Character, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• If you sort of see yourself writing into a space that you don't always recognize, you sometimes learn things that you knew, but weren't entirely aware of. It's very liberating for a writer to go into a space where she or he has not gone before, because, instead of being a tourist, you're like an explorer now, and you're sort of lost in this new idea.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Ideas, Space

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I want the younger writer to know that she or he is meaningful, that what they have to say is powerful in this world. But they can't come indoors, they can't close the curtains, they can't, like, lock themselves away from the world and say nothing.

  Colum McCann

  Meaningful, Powerful, Locks

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Impossible, Knows

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.

  Colum McCann

  Writing, Eye, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

  Colum McCann

  Shapes, Imaginative

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.

  Colum McCann

  Fiction

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

  Colum McCann

  Perfection, Stories, Language

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one for ages but just got tangled up in novels. The novel is the same in the sense that it is also a universe, but it explodes outwards with all that shrapnel going in several different directions. I don't see too much difference in the forms except for the fact that writing short stories is like sprinting rather than long-distance running.

  Colum McCann

  Short Love, Running, Distance

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.

  Colum McCann

  Character, Jew, Stills

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

  Colum McCann

  Children, Parent, Bereavement

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

• Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.

  Colum McCann

  Believe, Men, Cogs

• I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense that we shape our stories, so anything that even happens on the news gets shaped in a certain way and gets a texture, and that the imagined can be real.

  Colum McCann

  Real, News, Stories